But but but I finally finished hers, and…
Wednesday February 28th 2007, 7:40 pm
Filed under: Knit


(Power failure for hours today, sorry about that.)

Jacqueline loved pink. I had this pink baby alpaca scarf all ready to go for her, hoping she would come home from her long hospitalization, but things weren’t looking too good. Many visits were made, and in the end, she thanked everybody, asked that we all do a good job of looking out for her husband, and then the first person I think I ever met who’d fled the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s let go of this life. We went to her funeral today.

I had never heard the story of her parents trying to sell off their belongings there in Oklahoma, setting off for California with their toddler the only way they could afford: they walked. And hitchhiked. And eventually got here, and did indeed find a job in Santa Barbara. They stayed.

The last time I’d gone to a funeral at our church, it was for Al, who’d been 96. Sitting there that day, there was a sudden severe jerk as the pew banged upwards underneath me, the left end jolting hard, immediately bolting to the right. I glanced up: the chandeliers were swinging hard, hard enough that I glanced at Mark sitting directly under one, trying to gauge whether, if it broke loose, I would have time to throw myself across the aisle and shove him out of the way in time as it fell. California earthquake building codes, please be enough! The poor speaker, terribly nervous from the moment he’d sat down before the services, seemed completely oblivious; maybe he thought it was just his knees giving way from stagefright. I managed not to suddenly giggle at the thought that the swinging chandeliers were Al waving happily goodbye to everybody.

Jacqueline didn’t go for the showmanship, I suppose one could say; the earth held still. But as her friends spoke, we were moved.

Just a quiet coming together of friends and family wishing her well along her way home.



Taking over the world
Tuesday February 27th 2007, 5:41 pm
Filed under: Knit

I went to sign in with the receptionist at the doctor’s today, and a woman was sitting knitting. Bright pink, lacy, large… “A baby blanket?” I asked her. “Yes!” she exclaimed in delight. We talked knitting a moment, and I asked her if she’d been at Stitches the past weekend. Yes, and it was her first: talk about overload. She said that after they’d walked through all the aisles once, then it felt somehow manageable, and she could actually look at the yarns and things in the booths. But there was Just. So. Much. There.

How well I know that feeling.

And she was a fellow Lisa Souza enthusiast. How cool is that!

Then I signed in, her husband came out, she left, I sat down where she’d been, pulled out my red cashmere and silk, and another woman muttered, “Another knitter!”

If I had had a small finished project on hand, I might well have handed it to her on the spot to try to recruit her. We’re taking over the world, she might as well accept it happily.



Subversive
Monday February 26th 2007, 8:05 pm
Filed under: Knit

I was in the lab waiting for a routine blood test this afternoon, and so were a lot of other people. They had a sign up: “Projected wait: 20 minutes.” I pulled out my knitting, a lace scarf I’d begun. People came, people went, lots of people. Knit on. The sign got changed: “30 minutes.” I knew I wasn’t a stat, so I’d be pretty much last in line. I didn’t *think* I would run out of yarn…

An elegant elderly woman in a wheelchair came in, being pushed by her granddaughter. They came over next to me, the granddaughter sat down, and we all struck up a conversation; it is amazing how welcoming yarn and needles seem to universally be. The grandmother said, almost as if it were an admission and a failure on her part, a shirking of her grandmotherly role, that she’d never learned; the granddaughter told me she’d made a stab at it herself, and that a lot of young women like her seemed to be learning these days.

I picked up my ball of blue baby alpaca/silk and had them each hold it a moment, as I said that there are so many really nice yarns out there these days, and they don’t have to cost a lot. They oohed and aahed over the sheen and the softness, stroking it a bit; I went on, saying, to fall in love with knitting, you really need a nice yarn. Not, say, a cheap acrylic.

The granddaughter nodded and said that cheap acrylic is indeed what she’d used, that one time when someone had been teaching her. But touching this, she could see how the knitting bug could really reach out and grab you.

You betcha. (Now. Why did you think I held it out to you, eh?)



Stitches!
Monday February 26th 2007, 1:20 pm
Filed under: Knit


This is a slightly breathless-sounding post, but if you’ve ever been, you understand the overload. Stitches West was wonderful and overwhelming and totally a Disneyland for knitters–over 200 vendors. I love it. I love running into people I only ever get to see there, some local, some from all over the world. That delightful fellow from Wagtail Yarns in New Zealand, with my hearing loss in that noisy place and his accent, we somehow need to put closed captions on him when he talks, but we laughed at ourselves and managed just fine. (His kid mohair in Dark Teal. The intense color!) I finally got to see Blue Moon Fiber Art’s yarns, and understand why they’re so popular. Gorgeous. (Backstabber: was that deep rose-red colorway named after that bank that yanked their credit card operations for their Socks That Rock Club, claiming selling sock yarns had to be a terrorist front, that no one knits socks? If it is, they made something beautiful out of that whole mess, I love this stuff.) I got to see, of course, Sheila Ernst and Lisa and Rod Souza, my favorites. (Mardi Gras, Saint Valentine, Berry Poppins, with Jellybeanz on order, and Lime and Violet glass needles to play with them on.) I got to go to Half Pint Farm’s booth and exclaim on behalf of my friend Cris (it’s a tradition), “Ellen: you ROCK!” She laughed and laughed; I hadn’t forgotten! (Emerald, silk/merino.) Karen at Royale Hare, who wanted to read my whole book on the spot (Cazadero Mist, Fitch Mountain Frost.) I got to see Melinda at Tess Designer Yarns, who’d been pretty stressed last year; I didn’t help at all at the time, given that I caught and tore an expensive yarn with my wheel, and she waved me away when I tried to pay for it: so as a thank you for her kindness, I took some of her hand dyed silk I had, knitted it up into a scarf, and surprised her in the mail with it not long after. This year, she seemed much more relaxed, enjoying people, really enjoying the show and how much people loved what she’d dyed. I patted myself on the head and chose to believe I’d played a small but good part. If nothing else, knitting for her had made it all the more important to me that she have a good time, and she was clearly having a good time. Yay!

I had people coming up and introducing themselves over and over, and thank you to each of you if you’re reading this, you totally made my day. At one point, I exclaimed, “SUE!” I hadn’t seen her since I’d gone to…well, let’s see, my younger daughter was in fourth grade at the time and is a college junior now. Been awhile. I got to see Robert, who wove my much-loved medicine blanket. Very, very cool.

Pictured above are two of my favorites, Pam Bell and Darrin Kaufman of Pacific Meadows Alpacas (garnet for a shawl, and red for a scarf). Darrin found me before I found them, and dropped everything to come over and chat awhile. They sell the baby alpaca yarn that I used in a lot of the shawls in my book–wonderful, soft stuff, and they are two of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. So don’t mind me; I’m bragging on my friends for a minute here.

So, meantime, if anybody bought the silk/stainless steel blend yarn from Habu, tell me, what on earth do you DO with it?! Their website says it was originally developed for oil filters. It reminds me of the old joke that if you give an avid knitter steel wool, he or she might knit you a Volkswagon.

A little bit of each of these vendors, most of them people who are already good friends, will be there with me as I knit up their yarns. Good times ahead.



Afghans for Afghans
Friday February 23rd 2007, 9:06 pm
Filed under: afghans for Afghans,Knit,Knitting a Gift

Before I say the rest of this, I want to publicly thank Shelly, who has emailed with me any number of times but whom I had never met. Today was her first-ever Stitches, she was only going for the one day, and she spent three hours of it pushing me around. Knitters are such nice people… Many, many thanks, Shelly.

When I was knitting my Barnswallows scarf for my book, I picked out a yarn that reminded me of the color of well-weathered wood, Jaggerspun Zephyr in Mushroom; it went with the story and it felt right. But as I knit it, I wondered whom it would eventually go to. It was pretty, but it wasn’t a color you’d be seeing me wearing any too often.

Ann Rubin is the person behind Afghans For Afghans, as I noted on my Weapons of Mass Construction entry, and for the last several years she has run a booth cum collecting point at Stitches for people wanting to donate handmade warm woolen things for the people of Afghanistan. To wage peace and goodwill. I’ve stopped before and chatted a bit, but never felt virtuous enough to make the effort to knit a whole blanket.

Well, Ann recently put out a call asking for hats, mittens, small things; someone was flying over there, but luggage space would be a problem. The one time I finally have an afghan I want to offer, a donegal tweed wool knitted with a camelhair/lambswool, big and warm and practical. So I emailed Ann; could she still use this? Sure, she said; there will be another shipment going not too far off, bring it, and thanks.

I went to the KnitU meetup last night, held after the opening-day stuff was otherwise over. I didn’t expect Ann to recognize me; other than the fact that I’ve been in a wheelchair at Stitches past, there was nothing ever to make me particularly stand out when we’ve met before. She and I were sitting across the large room from each other at this meeting, and she was dead tired, could hardly keep her eyes open–but they had us go around the room and say our names; she registered mine when I said it, her face lit up, and she smiled a silent hello.

Getting ready for bed last night, it suddenly hit me in total clarity: if I knitted something for Ann, anything warm she would feel morally obligated to share with those in far greater need of that warmth. She is someone who cannot sit still when there are humans in need. But the story of that Barnswallows scarf was about creating a place of peace in a background of ongoing war–and it is a wispy little thing, a bit of Jaggerspun Zephyr, a symbol and an airy lightness.

There is nobody else it could possibly have been for.

(Ann hesitated to accept it; she didn’t want to leave the other volunteers out, and she didn’t want the focus to be on her. I told her it would be wonderful publicity for the Afghans For Afghans project, and with that she relented. And she absolutely loved her scarf.)



Why yes, I do knit a little
Thursday February 22nd 2007, 3:45 pm
Filed under: Knit

The doorbell rang this afternoon. It was the tall UPS guy, with two boxes: a smaller one full of yarn I’d hand dyed–that picture will be on page 10–and the second one full of the projects in the book. Plus a few that didn’t fit in, including the green one Amazon currently shows as being on the cover. That cover got ditched when I pointed out that the pattern wasn’t in the book. Oh, oops.

So here, with a Kaffe Fassett coffee-table-style knitting book at the back for scale, is all the knitting projects of the last two years that I haven’t given away. Most of them, however, I’ve given away.

Why, yes, I do buy more yarn when I go to Stitches. Fancy that. (…My husband and the wheelchair repairman set my top speed at 8 mph. I could wipe out a whole aisle if I forget to turn the thing off while writing out a check. But it also means that baby alpaca/silk at Lisa Souza’s is going to be mine, because I can get there faster than anyone else.)

See you there!

(Edited to add: dead chair battery again. What, does it not like freezing garages? This is going to be interesting…)



Karen
Tuesday February 20th 2007, 7:56 pm
Filed under: Knit,LYS

This is Karen. She owns the Rug and Yarn Hut.

This is the friend who taught me how to spin and not to be afraid of dyeing my own yarns. It’s just playing with watercolors, have a good time!

This is the friend whom I called after my car accident in ’00, and told her my sister wanted a navy afghan for Christmas, I needed yarn, but the world was spinning around and I couldn’t drive.

This is the LYSO (local yarn store owner) whose response was to pack up her minivan, drive the 25 minutes each way to my house, present me with all the navy yarns she had for me to choose from, and who then GAVE ME A DISCOUNT at her great insistence, along with a hug, and told me to get better.

I’d tell you about her white and gray cat climbing into her dyepot and snuggling down into that nice warm wool and dyeing itself green semi-permanently, totally freaking out the neighbors, except that I’m saving that for the next book.

If you’ve got a good LYSO, give them your best. Because there just aren’t enough Karens in the world.



Chris Baldwin
Monday February 19th 2007, 12:06 pm
Filed under: Non-Knitting


Around Christmastime, I ordered a few copies of this book to give away; Chris Baldwin at littledee.net writes the best comic strip since Calvin and Hobbes. After I got done with all the wrapping and shipping to far-flung family, come to find out I’d miscounted and my own prized copy was winging its way across the country to make someone else have some good laughs.

Which Margo Lynn knew nothing whatsoever about. She just knew there was this really cool comic strip, and now there was a book, and she wanted to make me happy… So she ordered me a copy.

Meantime, I had taken the nonsense knitting pattern that Vachel the Vulture knits in one scene, had knitted it up out of a bamboo/wool mix, made a vulture wing with it, photo’d it for this blog, and eventually mailed it off to Chris Baldwin; I figured he’d get a kick out of seeing what that pattern turned into. He did.

So when Margo Lynn ordered me that copy, this is what he did before shipping it off…

Chris, you’re the best. You, too, Margo Lynn.



Elvis the lion puppet has entered the building
Sunday February 18th 2007, 2:22 pm
Filed under: Knit


Last week, I was waiting for an elevator up to my doctor’s appointment, and an elderly man in a motorized wheelchair and his bored-looking attendant came around the corner to wait for the doors to open with me. He looked just like an age-progressioned version of the dad in the neighborhood, growing up, whose storm door I had careened through as a little kid (see Kathleen’s afghan story on my main website), and I instantly liked the guy for that. So. His chair looked a lot like the one I use occasionally, and I told him that as I unzipped my purse and pulled out whichever random fingerpuppet came to hand. I explained that I keep one over the joystick on my scooter and find that it makes me instantly friends with all the little kids around me (very true), especially bored ones in waiting rooms. He needed one for his joystick, too!

The attendant still looked bored. The man was absolutely delighted, so she put it over his joystick. He asked if I’d made it, and I admitted that no, I do knit, but these I buy by the dozens from Peru–but they are handknit. He declared, Well, then, I have to pay you! I laughed, as we were boarding the elevator together, telling him, Hey: it cost me eighty cents. Enjoy!

I’d had a twinge while unzipping that purse, not knowing what kind of condition the old man’s mind might be in, given that his body had clearly seen better days. But his mind, heart, and sense of humor were utterly delightful; I’m so glad I didn’t hesitate.



Weapons of mass construction
Saturday February 17th 2007, 1:13 pm
Filed under: afghans for Afghans,Knit,Knitting a Gift

(My Rabbit Tracks pattern with the recommended extra edging at the sides. Yarn: Lisa Souza’s Seafoam colorway; sorry I don’t have any more of the requisite cashmere knitted up on hand for the illustration.)

I am so stealing this line from Carol H., a commenter over at Yarnharlot’s blog. Stephanie aka Yarnharlot wrote a superb post Friday that every knitter who has ever been condescended to, but who wants to handle it well, can relate to. For me, the biggest such moment was when a medical resident last October, seeing me knitting as I sat in my hospital bed, having just met me and knowing nothing whatsoever about me except the fact that I knit, when I mentioned something about my blog and website, gasped loudly, “YOU!!! have a WEBSITE?!!?”

Like wielding two sticks and some wool means you’re not capable of using a computer? Sir?

Stephanie is a woman who, single-handedly, raised $320,000 for Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres from her fellow knitters simply by asking for people to open their hearts. This is a woman with great power to do good, by how she writes and who she is. Her picture is on the very first day that this blog was launched, if I may so brag, from when she was in Los Altos, CA for a booksigning–one that involved a city permit to take over a large parking lot to accommodate the over 300 knitters who showed up for it.

And yet at another venue, she had someone hesitate to set up that tenth chair in their hands, no matter her protests, sure there couldn’t possibly be ten knitters in the area to want to come to a signing for a knitting book. Knitting?

Thus Carol H.’s line: we hold “weapons of mass construction” in our hands. We use them to show people we love them. And there are a lot of us. Ann Rubin’s Afghans for Afghans project, putting warm clothes and blankets made by hand–not just physical warmth from things bought, but a real and human warmth, stranger reaching out to stranger–I think goes a huge but quiet way to launch peace between the peoples of our countries. Our hours spent doing so cannot be bought: they can only be given. And when they are given, when we measure our lives in a manifestation of real caring, we have great power to do good.

Weapons of mass construction. Let’s knit!

Oh, and, that resident? The last day I was there, he looked at the lace scarf I was working on, in cashmere that I had dyed in shades of a royal blue, (absolutely gorgeous if I do say so, and I do say so), and said, wistfully, “I have a wife…”

I thought long and hard about it after I finished it, and finally went back to Stanford and left it with my favorite nurse, whom I’d already gifted with baby alpaca/silk lace, to give that man for his wife, the resident being unavailable just then (she paged him; he was there somewhere; we tried.) A physical reminder, soft, lovely, and skilled in the craftsmanship, that he needs to truly see his patients, not write them instantly off on the basis of his prejudices. It gently holds fast to the truth that I did not write HIM off despite that and other mistakes I believe he won’t repeat. I figure, if I’m to be part of his medical education, then it’s essential I play the part well.

We can construct a massive amount of good by holding fast to our good will. When we express it in stitches, all the better.



Anyone get the license on that drive-by truck that hit me?
Friday February 16th 2007, 3:30 pm
Filed under: Knit

Drive-by knitting.

They had no idea. None. The timing! That the last few nights I’d considered packing a hospital bag, didn’t pack one, but I did go hunting through my stash till I found the second ball of that yarn I needed to finish the project on my needles–knowing that Richard wouldn’t have a chance of finding it. (Yeah, like if he were to tell me to go grab the particular ham radio that… Not a chance.) Just in case. My Crohn’s and my dysautonomia both had started to flare recently, and I can manage as long as I don’t start barfing, which my low blood pressure can’t handle, and I don’t know what meds are left to try now if my permanent chemo stops holding off the Crohn’s, and I’m trying not to get overly worried about it, yeah, I’ll be fine, and and and…

And feeling not as fine as I’d like.

So. Last night I went to my monthly knitting group, which had been moved forward a week because of Stitches being next week. My friend Nancy had called to make sure I’d be going, and had picked me up so that a ride wouldn’t be an issue; Los Gatos is a bit of a hike, and last month my husband was answering a Red Cross call and I had had to miss half of it.

We did the usual go-around-the-room and show off, and when it got to Nancy’s turn, she stood up and said, ‘Scuse me a minute.

She disappeared into the back room. She reappeared with a box, gorgeously wrapped.

I have been a party to some of Nancy’s shenanigans in the past, but I never ever thought I’d… My stars!!

Finally someone said, Well, OPEN it! I looked up at last at that, my jaw still on the ground, and said plaintively, My hands forgot how!

Open it. I opened it. And out came this: a congratulations from my local knitting friends on the June 11 publication of my book. Nancy had put all the squares together and had attached a tag naming the creator to each block. Nancy’s is wool she’d handspun–she’s the one who’d dragged me kicking and screaming to Karen’s shop to learn how to spin, back when my kids were in elementary school. Pam’s is handdyed cashmere/silk–Pam was one of the test knitters for my book, giving me feedback on how I’d written the patterns out and reassuring me I’d done okay with them. Llama, wool, mohair, smooth, boucle, chenille, sock handpaint: every square is done in a yarn and pattern that reflects the knitter. And every one is a huge burst of love. I was. Stunned. Speechless.

How could I not be well, with all that love and goodwill buoying me up? I went home, showed off to my husband and my youngest, and then fell into bed and slept for ten solid hours.

And woke up much better.



Roses are red-faced
Thursday February 15th 2007, 12:16 pm
Filed under: Knit,Life


I wrote another note re roses last night, while giving my hands a rest from knitting and being too wired from all the Scharffenberger chocolate to sleep:

When I was in college, I was dating an older fellow with whom I was supremely incompatible but whom I was, for awhile, in love with, and who very much wanted to settle down and marry me. Meantime, my old friend Richard, whom I’d known since I was a week old, was off to France on a mission for the Mormon Church.

Come summertime, his two years being up, Richard came home. There was a large party held for the twenty-something young adults in the area, and we all came. So it was that I ran into my old high-school buddy–we’d never dated, we’d been good friends, more akin to siblings than anything else–and I took one look at the guy I’d been dating right there, and I simply knew that that was that. He just didn’t measure up. It was over. It didn’t occur to me that I’d someday get to marry Richard, just, I knew I had to marry someone as good as him.

It wasn’t too long after that that Richard asked me out on our first actual date. It felt so much better being with him than George: with Richard, I wasn’t careening from wild highs to low lows, I was simply home. Eventually, he proposed; it felt so wonderful to say yes.

Word got out–I don’t know how, ’twasn’t me–to the first guy that I was engaged. He showed up at my doorstep. With (oh goodness) a dozen red roses, supposedly as a congratulations on my happiness. Can you say awkward!? Mercifully, he simply left quickly after thrusting them into my stunned hands at my door.

Richard showed up less than an hour later. I was living in an apartment with three other single women; he looked from the doorway to the kitchen table, and asked, curious, whose roses those were?

“Mine…” I was beyond chagrinned.

“Who gave them to you?” It certainly made no sense to him. It made no sense to me either!

(Oh man what do I do with this!?) “George…”

“‘Scuse me a moment.” And with that, he spun on his heels and disappeared. I had no idea what he was going to do nor what to say. He reappeared not too long after, with One. Single. Rose. The very longest long-stemmed red rose I had ever laid eyes on in my life. It was big, and it was in direct contrast to the bunch that had so many littler ones crammed together into that vase, a crowd noisily vying for attention all at once. Richard’s single rose had presence, it had self-confidence, and it was from the man who knew he had my full heart.

So I occasionally razz him gently about the big bunches of red roses at Valentine’s; one will always do it, for me.

But I’ve also learned, however he wants to celebrate it, let him do it his way. He knows what he’s doing. He always has.



Maytag, you’re it!
Wednesday February 14th 2007, 1:48 pm
Filed under: Non-Knitting


We had a Maytag dishwasher. Out of five dishwashers in 26 years of marriage, it was by far the best one we’d ever had–till we had a houseful of people (of course) keeping it going constantly in December. We replaced the hose; then it started smoking of burning rubber. Come to find out (thank you MSNBC!) that it was under recall, that Maytag would give you $75 toward a new one, and finding the motor fried at this point, we gave up and ordered one a month ago.

And waited. And waited. It seems there were a lot of people who suddenly wanted to replace their nine-year-old dishwashers too (ya think? After the part under recall set off housefires? And being offered that much to replace something that’s both that old and has worked so well in the past?)

Yesterday, oh, goodness, at last Home Despot finally delivered. Last night my husband and son worked till all odd hours getting that thing in, and then today my sweetie brought me locally-grown, bug-free, organic roses to top it off. No high-dose pesticides poisoning workers in Columbia. We’re lucky; there’s a small grower’s co-op just a few miles from here.

They say the way not to be romantic is to buy your wife an appliance. They also say no man was ever shot doing the dishes. Me, I’d say that the effort my sweetie put in to make my life far easier (grumbling for hours over the hieroglyphic-only instructions geared at the non-English-speaking) is just incredibly lovely, and he could have skipped the flowers altogether. He tells me that whether I like roses or prefer amaryllises is irrelevant, he has to teach his sons how to treat their future wives. Roses it is. And yes, he’d checked the undersides of the leaves to make sure no little oval carpet beetle eggs or bugs lurked there to come infest my stash. This man of mine: he’s a keeper.

Ditch the dishtowel and raise the flowers high: Happy Valentine’s, everyone!



Up and running
Monday February 12th 2007, 12:56 pm
Filed under: Knit

You’ll meet my friends Nina and Rod when my book comes out, but in the meantime, a week ago Sunday, their college-age daughter ended up in the ER with her appendix gone bad. Laparoscopic surgery, and they sent her home the same day (wow).

Towards the end of the week, her parents were heading off for somewhere about 40 minutes away, and G. didn’t feel up to the excursion yet. No big deal. Their house had been having a power failure, so they hadn’t been able to recharge their cell phones. Again, not a big deal.

But that is why G. could not reach them. So she called her sister, who’s a veterinarian in another state. Who told her, Go! G. had the sense to know she was in too much pain by that point and had better not try to drive herself, and called a friend from church who just happened to have flown home from college for a couple of days. (“You could have called me!” Oh. Didn’t think of that.)

Which is why, after Nina and Rod returned home, they got a knock on their door, and the friend saying, um, G. isn’t home because I took her to the ER at Stanford and they’ve admitted her. Thought you might like to know. Sorry I couldn’t stay, I’ve got to run to catch my flight, ‘bye!

My hubby and I went over to visit G. yesterday, and we were thrilled to see how well she was recovering from her abscess. Meantime, her room was in the same ward, same floor as where I’d been in October, and I saw one of my old nurses. Two rooms over from G. was her high school teacher’s mom and the teacher was there visiting, and G. somehow made the whole thing feel like a party: if you’re going to be sick, you might as well celebrate the flowers.

She and her friend just got added to my to-knit-for list. I’d better get to work. Meantime, just to show off, here’s my newly finished teal Sea Silk shawl.



Daffodils
Sunday February 11th 2007, 5:32 pm
Filed under: My Garden


Seven years ago, I bought these daffodil bulbs, and then was head-injured when a speeder totalled my car and his before I could plant them. I wanted my flowers! I dug along the front walkway with one hand, holding onto the spinning ground with the other. Every year since then, they have reminded me why I did that. Life goes forward. The daffodils celebrate every year–after the rains come.

Typed the woman whose Crohn’s went nuts at 4 am today. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll be fine. We just get these occasional blips to remind us how good we have it. And to make us go notice the flowers. I think I’ll go snip the rain-bent ones and bring them inside where they can perfume-ify the kitchen.)

Edited to add: between when I started writing that and when it actually got posted, most of the daffodils doing faceplants in those pictures taken this afternoon brushed the rain off themselves and got halfway back up. The two that did not are now in a vase.